The Booksnap is a neat contraption that is a low tech solution to a high tech problem. Seriously, when you see how this thing works, you will ask yourself, why didn’t I think of that? The Booksnap is simply a device that holds a book in place and mounts a pair of digital cameras. You turn the pages yourself and take perfectly positioned digital shots as you go. It is a lot faster than a flatbed scanner. In an article which appeared in the Washington Post:

Short verdict: not a revolution. More a thud than a snap, the device ”an ominous three-foot-high construction draped with a thick black darkroom-style shade” looks like a Goth puppet theater and weighs 44 pounds. Under the shade is an angled cradle for a book and a glass platen to hold the pages down during scanning. You turn the pages yourself. It costs $1,600, not including the two Canon digital cameras (around $500 each) necessary to capture the page images and send them to your computer, where software transforms the pictures into files that can be read on a screen or an e-book reader. It takes considerable fiddling to get images set up properly.

Supposedly, once you get started you can digitize 500 pages per hour, much faster and at higher quality than with flatbed scanners (which are much cheaper but not optimized for book scanning). I never got that far, but I imagine such a feat would require considerable caffeine.

E-book readers have not yet taken off and I have to agree that this is probably not the device to cause the jump that is perhaps inevitable. What the Booksnap will do is inspire innovation. It is a clever way to provide professional book ripping without the massive price tag of high end book scanners. It is not an everyman solution by any means, but the people that really love their books, rare book collectors and anyone that spends an inordinate part of their day reading will now have a means to digitize their collection. Will this result in an ever increasing amount of e-books on torrent sites? I think that the answer to that is most likely, no.

If you are interested in what the Booksnap can do, check out the Scanned samples on the Booksnap site.

Source: Bookofjoe, BookSnap,

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